career — 2015 — The 21st Century Matriarch

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

New Battery Technology Will Fundamentally Change the Way the Grid Operates - Cost effective storage of energy seems to be on the near horizon. It could overcome the complaint about the intermittent nature of solar and wind power generation.

The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dyes - There are probably still a lot of people covering grey hair with permanent hair dyes…not me. I’d rather enjoy my natural salt and pepper!

A Gorgeously Detailed View of Antarctica's Churning Ocean Currents and Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf Will Likely Disintegrate by Decade's End - Two recent articles about Antarctica. The first one is a visualization of simulations done at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The second article is bad news since it means global sea level rise will be increasing as glacial ice enters the ocean faster.

From Snapshot to Science: Photos of Biodiversity as Useful Records - Learn about National Geographic’s Great Nature Project. The Belmont BioBlitz observations have become part of the project!

The Birth of a Bee - A short video…well worth watching.

Recommended levels of activity rarely achieved in busy workplace environment - Many workplaces are quite sedentary. This study looked at 83 employees in a hospital. Only 6% of the participants reached the 10,000 steps per day goal even though the jobs of 53% of the participants were assumed to require ‘high’ levels of activity! I know when I started wearing a Fitbit I had to focus on getting steps in after my workday. Now that I am retired, it is easier to get the steps in throughout the day rather than focused at the end of the day.

China Coal Use Continues To Fall “Precipitously” - Now if this trend will continue….

First fully warm-blooded fish: The opah or moonfish - And now we discover that there is an exception to something we all learned in school….fishes are not all cold-blooded.

A Map Showing the "Most Distinctive" Causes of Death by State - It is a very colorful map…but does it mean very much. The most distinctive form of death in Maryland seemed strange to me…and ‘tuberculosis’ was listed for Texas.

How Machines Destroy (And Create!) Jobs, In 4 Graphs - I was somewhat surprised that the ‘services’ sector is not even larger. Looking at the graph historically - white collar jobs became the highest percentage and number of jobs in the 1950s and the trend continues.

Today I am focused on the third decade of life - typically the decade to finish a college degree and get started on a career. For me - it was mostly in the 1970s.

In my case it was done concurrently. I worked full time and went to school part time while my husband continued in school full time. It took me most of the decade to get an undergraduate degree in Biology and then a masters in Mathematics. I don’t remember reading for pleasure or watching very much television; there wasn’t any extra time. For a few years, my husband and I would meet for dinner so that we’d see each other during the week before late night!

The big pivot point in the decade was deciding to not continue in Biology for graduate school but to switch to Mathematics (Computer Science) which was the field I was working in for the whole decade. My employer paid most of the cost of the masters. Within a few months of my decision make a career in the computer field, we bought our first house.

We were on quite a budget the whole time. I made almost all my clothes and a good portion of my husband’s shirts; in those days it was a good way to save money. The flood of discount clothes from third world countries had not started yet. Sewing was no longer a money-saving endeavor by the next decade and is not a strategy to economize now.

Most of our vacations were between semesters or long weekends. We went camping in national (Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon) and state parks - cooking our own food over campfires. When we first started we simply took blankets and pillows and slept in the car! Sometime we had to share the space with a telescope. Foods were simple (hot dogs, cans of pork’n’beans, cookies) but later we got fancier (steak, corn on the cob, baked apples)….and all along there were s’mores. Later in the decade we acquired a tent, better sleeping bags, a Coleman stove and lantern. And we enjoyed canoeing on the Brazos and Guadalupe Rivers. Camping is still a viable way to vacation frugally and I’m sure there are people in the third decade of life that enjoy it still - but I realize that it has not kept up with population growth. Why is that?

Both of my grandfathers died while I was in my 20s while the grandmothers continued on. The grandfathers had both lived into their mid-70s. Demographic statistics tell us that people are living longer now but many people have their children later like I did. My daughter is in her 20s now and still has one grandfather (who is in his mid-80s); her husband only has one grandmother left and she is 90. What a boon of modernity in the developed world to have a high probability of grandparents living to see grandchildren reach to adulthood!

When I sum up my 3rd decade I think: 10 years for me to get a masters and, concurrently, start my career…and my husband to get a PhD.